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FreeBSD Documentation Project: Current projects

Here are the projects currently under way (or being actively
contemplated on the freebsd-doc mailing list).

If you think you can contribute to any of these, please do not
hesitate to stand up and be counted. You should talk to the
person responsible for that particular project, who can then bring you
up to speed on what is happening. If you have any ideas for a new
project then please email
FreeBSD-doc@FreeBSD.org.

Documentation TODO list

The Documentation TODO
list is an
up-to-date list of documentation issues that should be resolved.
If you wish to help us to improve the FreeBSD
documentation set you should, at first, choose to work on one of
the TODO list items.

Open documentation problem reports

Current FreeBSD problems reports are tracked using a Problem Reports
database.
You can view
the open documentation problem reports.

Improve Handbook Index

Synopsis: Many new sections have been added to the
FreeBSD Handbook without index terms, others have been added
under inappropriate primary or secondary indexterms that do not
fit the existing scheme. Some indexterms have been added inside
list items or other areas where they are not allowed by our
stylesheets, causing ??? to be printed in the index instead of
a real page number.

Index work requires experience and anyone who works on this
task is highly encouraged to carefully read through the existing
(print-output) index, and to have read the Chicago Manual of
Style or other style books that deal with indexing. Please see
the CVS history of some of the chapter.xml files to see some of
the indexing errors that have been corrected in the past.
It is imperative to view the PostScript version of the Handbook
after making any changes to indexterms as many errors, such as
long words or deeply nested indexterms will break the two column
output there, or cause the page number to be listed as ???.

There is a script doc/share/misc/indexreport.pl which
can be used to find areas of an SGML file where
<indexterms> are sparse.

Contribute Advocacy Slides/Presentations

Synopsis: Presentations marked up in the DocBook-slides
DTD have recently been added to the documentation set in
doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/slides. More advocacy content is
needed, and additional stylesheet work is needed to pull in
content from the release notes and other XML content in our
documentation set to build up-to-date slides with 'make'. A
simple example presentation was committed with some of this
functionality, but there is more work to be done! Also, the
stylesheets for print/PDF output (using the Java based XSLT
processors, PassiveTeX is too limiting for slides) could be
improved as the default DocBook Slides XSL-FO stylesheets
produce very spartan slides.

Write a section in the Handbook and/or FAQ

Synopsis: Chunks of the FAQ and Handbook have empty sections in
them. They need filling. If you have just had to use one of
these documents to complete a task, and found them lacking,
please find the time to write up your experiences as a
possible replacement.

Alternatively, if you have just had to do something that had no
entry in the FAQ and/or Handbook, please consider writing a
new section. Then submit it as outlined above.